


Here Lies A Missing Story

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [171]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Psi Corps, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 10:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23849389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Sandoval Bey was framed and arrested by (mundane) Psi Corps director Johnston, but commits suicide instead. Bey's death cements the evil Johnston's takeover of the Corps.What happened?The book doesn't say, now or later.Al Bester, who looked at Bey like a father figure, stands alone by Bey's grave and vows that some day, he will make Johnston PAY.Except the book leaves that out, too.You had one job, book.The prologue ofBehind the Glovesishere- please read!
Series: Behind the Gloves [171]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/677654
Comments: 23
Kudos: 3





	Here Lies A Missing Story

**Author's Note:**

> What is this series? Where are the acknowledgements, table of contents and universe timelines? See [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10184558/chapters/22620590).
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

Once upon a time, something terrible happened in the Corps. To the Corps.

Picking up where we left off in canon, after [this scene](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23749702) (Deadly Relations, p. 114):

And as [Bester] left, he felt the same flash of hatred he had felt all those years ago, when he had first seen this ice-eyed man. And there was something else - a danger, a threat. Not to himself, but to Bey. And it was mixed with a feeling of terrible triumph.

He fought to control his breathing all the way back to the dorms. Bey was in danger - grave danger, of that he was sure. He should warn him, go to his office- No, that was crazy; send him an anonymous message.

But what if Bey really had betrayed the Corps? Wouldn't warning him be an act of treason, too?

Yet it was plainly impossible. Bey _was_ the Corps, represented everything good about it. Even if he had sympathy for some rogues, that didn't mean-

The director was a mundane, a jealous, power-mad mundane, who-

He crushed those thoughts, but they kept coming back. Bey was in danger. How could he do nothing?

Then he convinces himself that Bey isn't really in any danger, and this is all a test of his (Bester's) loyalty to the Corps. He calms down, goes back to his dorm, and studies. And then...

Three days later he stood on closely trimmed grass, his legs like wood.

_It should be raining,_ he thought. _The sky should be black._

It wasn't. The sun dazzled, a jewel on a vast pillow of blue velvet and white lace. The leaves of the trees glistened with dew. Birds were singing, though the music - the music in his head - nearly drowned their song.

He was the only one there, at the grave. No one else had come. They said he was lucky to even be buried here, considering.

"They say-" He couldn't speak, he found - not with his throat. _They say you were helping the rogues, that you sympathized with them. They issued a warrant for your arrest, and when they came, they found you..._

He couldn't picture it, Bey standing on a chair, a rope around his neck, calmly kicking the chair from beneath him. It didn't fit. Bey hated suicides.

_I've heard - whispers - that they killed you. That they gave you a choice, and rather than disgrace the Corps you - you did it while they watched. Like a samurai. Is it true, Dr. Bey? I trusted you._

_(Anger, sudden, somehow like hiccups.) The director was right, or half right, wasn't he? You may never have helped the rogues, but you did sympathize with them. If you were given the same choice they gave me - good mundane or bad telepath - you would always choose the telepath, wouldn't you? What have your philosophies gotten you? Your jokes? How could you betray me by dying?_

The grave did not answer, of course. Al stood there, staring at the fresh earth - smelling it, like the flower beds after the ground crews broke them for planting - and he wondered if he would live. He wondered if a Human heart could just tear itself in half, if his life could simply vomit out of him, as anything he ate did, each time he pictured Bey hanging there, face purple, his beard still neatly trimmed.

_I could have warned you. I didn't. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, even if you really were a traitor._

It should be raining. The sky should be black. He closed his hand on the badge in his pocket, and it felt like a smooth piece of bone, long dead. His head was full of music, discordant, mocking.

Stravinsky.

*****

And then we jump ahead two years.

Let's put this another way.

Once upon a time, a woman goes to buy a car, but only sees a couple of tires lying on the ground.

"What are these tires doing here?" she asks the salesman.

"Oh, that's the car," he replies.

"The car? Where's the car?"

"Right there." He points. "It's just got a few parts missing."

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED

This canon scene leaves out:

  * The whole backstory of Johnston exiling and killing everyone close to Vacit, which Bey tried to warn Bester about
  * How Bey was framed, of which Bester's part was only a final straw
  * Why Bey committed suicide - how did his suicide "not disgrace the Corps"? Was there more to it than that? (For example, did he choose suicide so he wouldn't be scanned - giving Johnston ammunition against other members of the Corps?)
  * The psychological fallout on campus (and off-campus) from Bey's murder... Johnston didn't even permit a funeral
  * How these larger events - of which Bey's death was a critical part - fit into the larger history of the Corps, and the evil things Johnston does in the coming decades



The book ALSO leaves out:

  * Why Johnston's interrogation of Bester was a "trick question" - you can't choose between a "bad telepath" and a "good mundane" if said mundane is EVIL AS HELL
  * How Bester isn't simply "closing his hand on the badge in his pocket" - he's closing his _left hand_ on it, because clenching his left fist is (and has always been) his stress response... SEE EVERYTHING LATER. Even right there on page 114, two pages before, he's doing this... I'm sorry, Keyes, this detail matters.
  * Every other reaction Bester has to Bey's death... for example, how he quits his sports team and stops talking to all of his friends, just totally drops him (as Montoya later puts it) "like smelly shit," or, for example, how (as he mentions briefly here) he would throw up every time he tried to eat, or how guilty he felt for having indirectly contributed to Bey's death, by "not warning him" (as if this would have helped) or because of what had happened at the interrogation - and how the normally supportive Corps could do nothing to help him because the adults were so terrorized by Johnston's actions, and feared for _themselves_



Nor do we see Bester standing at the grave, vowing revenge on Johnston, no matter how long it may take. No, we just see out of the blue, fifty years later, Bester assassinating Johnston, and telling him that he's been planning this for fifty years. We see no planning at all, and we're never even _told_ about it until suddenly, Bester's assassinating him.

(Some assembly required.)

"See, I've been planning this for a very long time. That little attempt to blow me up yesterday really worried me - not because you tried to kill me, you've done that often enough - but because I thought you were onto me. Years and years of planning, shot to hell. But no, fortunately it turned out to be just a coincidence."

"What are you talking about?"

"Director, I've been planning this moment since I was fifteen. Oh, I didn't know it then - I blamed Bey's death on him, on the underground. Well, Bey was weak, in a way - he did have sympathy for the rogues. It's the same sympathy that allowed him to catch them, and maybe it got a little out of hand. But he was no traitor."

I think Bester was sixteen, actually, since he was in his final year at the Minor Academy, and he was fifteen in telepath age reckoning the year before, but of all the mistakes here, this one's pretty small.

The big issue is that there needs to be some connection shown between that scene and Bester's decision - whenever he made it - that he had to kill Johnston. If he didn't vow it at the grave, then at some later point he remembered this moment (and others), and made that decision. Where is that moment?

And even if back when he was sixteen, Bester still couldn't entirely process that the director could be _that_ evil (though he did already know)... if he was still struggling to rationalize Bey's murder, telling himself that somehow this had to be the fault of the Underground (for existing), or somehow that it was Bey's own fault for being too weak, right?... we would still see the seeds of a deeper realization about the director.

Bey _wasn't_ a traitor, you see. The director was.

(Deadly Relations, p. 256)

"Well, Bey was weak, in a way - he did have sympathy for the rogues. It's the same sympathy that allowed him to catch them, and maybe it got a little out of hand. But he was no traitor. And then there was Montoya, and Brett - well, I'm not going to go through it all. I understood that you were a danger to the Corps that first day I met you, when I was six. I knew even then that you hated us."

"I'm the director of Psi Corps, you idiot."

"And a fine one you've been. Slowly selling us out to the mundanes, bit by bit. And to someone else, yes?"

Well, yes. We know about the Shadows... except oh wait, THAT STORY IS ALSO MISSING.

(One car for sale: Some assembly required.)

These omissions are shockingly large and relevant. Later in the same scene, Bester tells Johnston that he's been planning the assassination for _over twenty years_ \- that would be before 2236! - but the book never shows us a moment of this. We find out _here_ , for the first time - TEN PAGES FROM THE END OF THE BOOK - that Bester has been actively planning the assassination since well before the Earth-Minbari War.

Page 258:

"All my life I've lived for the Corps. I've done everything for the Corps. This - this is just for me. I've been working on it for a long time. Hugin and Munin there, for instance. I studied the criteria you use to pick your personal teeps and started conditioning possible candidates twenty years ago. My greatest worry, Director, was that you would drop dead before I was ready."

Over twenty years - but it's all missing.

And speaking of Brett...

(Dark Genesis, p. 200-201)

"It's a matter of control, Al. In the old days, Cadre Primers were placed in strategic positions. The low-level ones became instructors, but the P12s went on to high command. Now there's a black box out there that they won't let any of us into. Because we're all suspect. Do you know how many of us have died?"

"No."

" _Most_ of us, Al. Milla's gone. And Menno. Ekko. And I went back through the older generations. You met Natasha Alexander once?"

"Yes. Here, on Mars. She was the commander of Department Sigma."

"One of the first from Cadre Prime, and her mother and her mother's mother were both in the Metasensory Regulation Authority before it became Psi Corps. She was assassinated. She used to be Vacit's aide, did you know that? No Primers in Department Sigma, Al. Or in top Admin. She was in the black box and so they got her out. You should have been promoted all the way to the top, years ago. You know it, I know it.

"Oh, they let you have your Black Omega Squadron to keep you busy, but you know you're still on the outside. You have to. I should be higher up, too, though I never had the ambition you did. They've held us down, Al. And if they ever think they can't, they'll kill us."

"They? Who is _they_?" Al demanded angrily. Montoya had spoken of _they_.

"Johnston and his cronies, his pet telepaths, laters all - And behind them, a select group of senators, governors, industrialists - IPX especially. Mundanes, Al, mundanes. They're taking it away from us. From our children." He grabbed Al's arm. "Don't you know why Sandoval Bey was killed? You were his friend, don't you want to know?"

YES, the readers want to know, but Bester is being an "unreliable narrator" here. At that moment, he doesn't want to know. He doesn't let Brett tell him - he just shouts "Enough!" at him, when he could have - and should have - scanned him. It's not like Brett would have objected - he'd literally come all the way to Mars to pass this information to Bester, before killing himself (and amazingly, not killing Bester too, in that staging attempt).

...He probably even asked Bester to scan him, while Bester was standing there like "wut," in his "I don't want to know" mode, genuinely afraid for his safety if he were to know what Brett knows - until Brett is suddenly dead and he realizes the gravity of the situation. And he does begin to investigate what Brett was saying - but the writing is disjointed with lots omitted, and the only scene we see is the interrogation of Timothy Jackson in a hollowed-out asteroid. That scene takes place after _both_ the McDwyer story and the (very long) story about the serial killer on Beta Colony, which is honestly not important _at all_ other than as the retconned story of Bester meeting Lyta to serve as the "explanation" for why she later decides the Corps is evil and Everyone Has To Die.

So everything is out of place.

I also discovered while writing this that there actually _is_ a very short and vague mention that Bester is plotting to kill Johnston. If you missed it, don't worry, I did too... and heaven only knows how many times I've been through this damn ~~multi-layer fail cake~~ book. Apparently I'd seen this once before, because it's highlighted? (Thanks, brain.)

Deadly Relations, p. 202:

He could hardly doubt that Brett believed what he said - he had died for it. Brett might be wrong, but too much of what he said fit too well with what Al already suspected. He had known about Johnston for years. [But is this shown? Do the readers get to see the suspicions he's had about Johnston for years?]

Indeed, he and Johnston would have a personal meeting one day, to discuss purely personal matters - that was certain. [This is canon's one sentence telling you he's been planning a super sophisticated assassination plot for the past, oh, fifteen or twenty years. ONE SENTENCE.]

But the larger conspiracy - he hadn't exactly seen the shape of it until now. If Brett was right, this amounted to much more than a political game inside the Corps. His telepaths were in danger. Alfred Bester's telepaths. They were all he had, all he cared about.

God help anyone who got in his way.

Anyway, Bester not letting Brett finish (or scanning him) - even if he does find out some of the same information through other means later on - combined with canon not showing readers most of Bester's later investigation into EarthGov's evil deeds, results in the readers not getting the story. Mentioning that there _is_ a story is not the same as telling it.

The story that matters isn't Beta Colony - it's the Shadow infiltration of EarthGov. And it's also the story of the long, long history of Evil Deeds that Johnston's been doing as director of the Corps - starting with the murder of Bey (and then Natasha Alexander). This ~~multi-layer fail cake~~ book is such a mess, it even leaves out the entire Earth-Minbari War, as if Bester did nothing interesting or important during that time (which of course isn't true).

They spend THREE WHOLE CHAPTERS on Beta Colony in this book - a remote colony in the ass end of space, that we never see again - and never once even _mention_ the Earth-Minbari War, let alone show Bester's role in it.

Please let that sink in.

I didn't start writing _Behind the Gloves_ because I wanted to have One More Conversation about the people on that space station. That space station is a footnote.

I'm writing this book because YOU. NEVER. GOT. THE. STORY.

(And God help anyone who gets in _my way_.)


End file.
